I’m trying to understand whether U.S. law provides any mechanism for holding a president personally financially liable for military action that was undertaken without congressional authorization.
Has this ever happened in U.S. history, and do current legal doctrines (such as presidential immunity, the War Powers Resolution, or appropriations rules) allow for the possibility of personal financial responsibility?
We won’t know for sure until the exact question is decided by the Supreme Court, but in Nixon v. Fitzgerald (1981), it was ruled that the President has absolute immunity from civil proceedings for official acts, and I can’t see how military action would not be an official act.
Are any government employees ever financially liable for their official actions?
The “Westfall Act” of 1988 allows a civil action against a federal employee to be removed to federal court and to have the United States substituted for the individual employee as the defendant. All that needs to happen for this is for either the Attorney General or a federal court to certify that “the employee was acting within the scope of his office or employment at the time of the incident out of which the claim arose.” As you can imagine, this makes it difficult to sue government employees in their individual capacity for things like simple negligence.
There’s also something called a “Bivens action” under which one can in principle sue federal agents who violated a plaintiff’s constitutional rights if there is no other legal remedy available. But the situations in which one can bring such a suit are extremely limited.
I suppose it might depend a bit on what ‘unauthorized’ is. But I can’t really see how a president, who is constitutionally head of the military, would be doing an unauthorized military action, since he’s the one that authorizes them (congressional approval for extended military actions not withstanding).
Personally, I hope they would not be personally liable, as this would hamstring any president that you might personally like and agree with, because those you don’t agree with would use it just as you would want to against the ones you don’t like.